TEACHING & LEARNING
Ideas
That Are Hotter Than July
OUTREACH
Nourishing
Businesses – and Bodies
PLUS: Watch the "Alumni Impact" video interview of Josh Kopelman
Faces of Wharton Entrepreneurship
RESEARCH
Creativity
Is Bunk
Creating a Sustainable Business among South Africa's Poor 'One Bite at
a Time'
Ideas that are Hotter than July
Students
at the Management & Technology Summer Institute Learn by Creating
Companies.
"You'll have to excuse me," the entrepreneur, Phil Lautman, tells his audience of roughly 100 folks. "I tend to pace when I talk. Let me know if the microphone doesn't pick up what I'm saying."
He straightens his tie, clears his throat and launches into his pitch. Brown-haired and slim, Lautman chops the air with his hand as he speaks. He and his team — they call themselves Qnote — have devised a note-taking device that melds some of the functionality of a laptop with the simplicity of a plain-old typewriter. Their machine has a laptop keyboard, a small screen and the ability to transfer its memory — a student's notes — to any flash-memory device. They haven't made a working prototype yet, but their nonworking mock-up fits into a three-ring binder. It's hardly wider than a sheet of notebook paper and no thicker than a deck of cards.
Retailers would sell it for $79. That's well within reach of most students — or more likely, their parents. Plus, Lautman points out, "teens prefer typing to writing." Today's students have grown up with computers and can type far faster than they can write.
Lautman finishes his remarks and asks whether anyone has any questions. Hands shoot up around the room.
In truth, Phil Lautman and his teammates aren't entrepreneurs at all. Lautman is a rising high-school senior from Lower Merion, Pa., and he, like the others, is playing a role. He and his classmates — fellow high schoolers from around the world — have spent the prior three weeks at the University of Pennsylvania enrolled in the second annual Management & Technology Summer Institute. The product fair at which Lautman spoke caps their course of study.
The institute grew out of the Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology, a joint-degree program run by the Wharton School and Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science. Thanks to the Fisher program, Lautman and 49 other students were able to enjoy a taste of college life this summer — and get credit for it. They spent their stint on campus studying innovation, entrepreneurship and engineering. Their curriculum culminated with the creation of a plan for an electronic device designed to appeal to their peers.
Having the students dream up a product and business "is a more straightforward way to present concepts like venture-capital funding and investors," explains Rob Weber (W'82-M&T), a Senior Fellow in the Fisher program and the students' main business instructor. "That approach forces them to grapple with questions like what's the size of the market? How many people would buy it? What about costs? It's easier to talk about those concepts in the context of a single company.
"In the program, we try to deeply immerse the students in innovation and intersection of technology and business," Weber adds. Besides the projects, their activities include hearing from a range of Wharton and engineering professors, poring through business case studies, taking field trips to such places as the New York Stock Exchange and QVC and sometimes studying till the wee hours of the morning. "We were up till 4 a.m. working on our project more than once," Lautman recalls. "We were busy all the time."
That's not totally true, Weber points out. The students were busy, for sure, but not all of their activities qualified as work. They also got to take in a Phillies baseball game and sample the famed cheesesteaks at Geno's restaurant in South Philadelphia.
Lautman knew better than his peers what awaited him at Penn. His brother, Jeremy, participated in the institute in the summer of 2005. Jeremy is arriving on campus as a Penn freshman and has enrolled in the Fisher Program. The Lautmans, like anyone who attends the summer institute, had to apply for admission. About 200 students sought this summer's slots.
Having summer-institute graduates like Jeremy choose Penn is one of the institute's goals, but not the only one, Weber says. The program also aims to turbo charge its students' understanding of innovation and engineering, giving them a head start no matter where they go to college. And it creates an awareness of Penn and the Fisher M&T Program among an ever-growing circle of the graduates' parents, siblings, friends, schoolmates and teachers. Indeed, attending the final presentations were not only Jeremy but also the Lautmans' parents and grandparents.
All that moral support didn't translate to triumph for Phil and his teammates in their final presentation. Nine other groups pitched their ideas that day, too. At the conclusion of the presentations, the audience was asked to vote for the best one — that is, the product that seemed to have the most-promising combination of feasibility and market potential — and also the most innovative one.
The prize for best project went to OmniTake, which created an electronic-tracking system for people's belongings. And the prize for most innovative went to Dentacare, which dreamed up a speedy hands-free toothbrush. Dentacare would install tiny brushes in a device that looks like a mouth guard. A user would pop in the mouthpiece and turn on the device. They could then simultaneously comb their hair or apply makeup while having their teeth brushed.
Though these companies, like Qnote, were imaginary, they were based on real technology appraisals, market studies and financial analyses. The instructors, Weber says, required that the products be not only feasible but also affordable enough to appeal to a mass market. And they couldn't just be wacky gadgets. They had to meet a real need.
OmniTake, for example, would use radio-frequency identification to tag stuff like keys, laptops, iPods and cell phones — anything a person might forget when heading out the door. A sensor attached to the wall near the entry to a person's home would notify him if he started to leave without one of his tagged items. RFID is currently an expensive technology used mostly by companies in inventory control. But as with many new technologies, its price should fall fast.
Likewise, Dentacare didn't pitch its product on its ability to clean teeth better — though the team members said it should be able to do that. Instead, they said it would be a time saver, allowing people to "multitask" and save about a minute and a half every time they brushed. Over the course of a year, that could add up to real time — more than 18 hours. "Lack of time is a major problem for sleep-deprived high-school students," quipped team member Jim Liu.
Especially when they come to the Fisher summer institute.
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